I watched you video some hours ago and here is my 2cents:
Software in general is like a living organism. Essential parts for survival will retain and vestigial parts will eventually get removed. therefore, deprication is unavoidable, especially for things that are not integral and central or for things that can/should be updated.

As for me, I was aware of `egrep` and `fgerp`, but I have never ever used them as I prefer `-E` and `-F` in grep.
🧵 👇🏼

Honestly, even if they do this, I cannot see why linux distributions can't just make the alias themselves.

As you said, it is not an extra maintainance burden. Some distros already have aliases for stuff like 'ls -a'. It could either be in the default bash config, or an actual script redirecting to the new command.

I actually really like openSUSE's solution to this where egrep and fgrep are just scripts:

#!/bin/sh
exec grep -E "$@"

#!/bin/sh
exec grep -F "$@"